


Puzzle Pieces

by orphan_account



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, I feel like this is all out of character and i hate it but posting it anyway., I hate punctuation, Puzzles, calm, way too generous use of commas
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-29
Updated: 2016-12-29
Packaged: 2018-09-13 04:40:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 956
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9106987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Ana solves puzzles, because it is a way of calming oneself while still doing something.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Un-beta'd. Warning : This fic might have a couple problems with tenses because no matter how hard I try I always find myself switching between them.

After her 'death' Ana solves puzzles. At least when she isn't bounty hunting in Egypt, mostly when she travels a bit over Europe just to feel the difference in setting, a change in scenery. These Puzzles are not the metaphorical or mental kind, but those made of cardboard and paper. It does, on a few levels, make her feel ridiculously old. Puzzles of this sort have become little more than a relic of another time, an antique that no one saw the value in collecting. Even the poor families left devastated by wars and other conflicts have little interest in puzzles. Puzzles, which can be bought so very cheaply from people who have priceless memories and heart within those cardboard shapes.

She keeps a notebook - and writes down every puzzle she completes then tallys them up based on the number of pieces. The 1000 piece ones are her favourite, though they aren't easy to come by, and the one she's doing right now is 1000 pieces, displaying a night in France that looks like something a friend might have described to her once upon a time. She's currently completed exactly 13 thousand pieces, 56 hundred pieces, 34 five-hundred pieces, and a couple ranging somewhere between those numbers. Her most prized puzzle though, is a 100 piece farm scene, that actually contains 99 pieces of cardboard and one roughly cut out piece of paper.

She had received the puzzle from an elderly woman whose English carried a thick accent that sounded just shy of Russian. "We lost the piece, so my five year old son decided to make one. I hope that is no problem." It wasn't a problem, and she took the puzzle without asking why there was no sign of a child in that house, why the walls seemed so very empty and quiet. She didn't ask whether he would have been five now, or whether he was five then. It was not her place to dig up old ghosts. Even if she would be considered an old ghost by now.

Puzzles were something introduced to her by her mother, but admittedly not something that Ana passed down to her own daughter. Fareeha had not been a person in need of active calmness, last time they talked. Fareeha had still been a child, even if she pretended to be an adult in the way all children do. Like any child, Fareeha was active movement and still calm. Puzzles would not have been good for her, and Ana had entertained the thought of introducing Fareeha to them when she was older. It was doubtful that it would happen now.

Puzzles were methodical. Find the edges, set them out so that you know the size of the puzzle, where things go and then match the middle to what you can see in the edge. A simple, methodical way of doing it that hardly ever failed. Find the outside, know how big the thing you're dealing with is, it's exact proportions, then sort out the middle. It was calming, in the way that it was still something to do with your hands, not the same sort of calm that came with tea, but calm nonetheless.

She had occasionally done them while in Overwatch, but Overwatch was so busy that she found herself drinking tea more often than completing puzzles. The still kind of calm was needed more than the active calmness of puzzles.

Gabriel had surprised her, once, when after a mission that had been all kinds of trouble he had walked in to her office, put a 500 piece puzzle down and just started doing it. The same way as her, edges first then slowly working his way to the middle. She had smiled, put her tea down and joined in. It took them no more than 5 minutes with their combined efforts. They didn't speak a word, and he left her afterwards staring at a beautiful shot of Cairo broken by the lines of puzzle pieces.

Jack had never been much for puzzles, at first not even knowing quite what they were, but she had asked him to follow her and when he did, she put down the puzzle and waited. For what felt like a far longer time than it should have, he had stared at her as if she had shown him an alien child. There was something a whole other sense of calming about teaching him the best way to do them, and something far too funny when he insisted on doing the middle first. It took them longer, but working from the middle was a new kind of challenge that she will admit she enjoyed.

Jesse had been the only other person she shared her puzzles with. He had looked at her for a few seconds, as if confirming that this wasn't a bizarre new form of punishment, then started to do it. She had done nothing but watch as the boy, _man_ , in front of her picked a piece out, found as many pieces that fit with it and when he couldn't find the next one just picked another piece at random and repeated the process. It was a backwards way of doing it, but Ana smiled when he finished it, looking all the more calm even as that metal arm twitched slightly, glowing silver with new-ness.

Ana liked puzzles, and she had solved so many of them within her lifetime, with so many different people. She hoped that puzzles would never truly die out, though if they had been animals they would have probably been considered Critically Endangered by now. So much could be taught with puzzles, and so much gained about a person from simply watching them complete one.


End file.
